Watch Taron Egerton Shoot Two Arrows In Less Than a Second for ‘Robin Hood’

We have become conditioned to believe that pretty much anything we see in a big Hollywood movie is fake. Robert Downey Jr. is not really running around in a big metal suit; Mark Ruffalo does not actually transform into a giant green monster (to the best of my knowledge). So when you see Taron Egerton jumping around and shooting arrows as the new Robin Hood in the upcoming film of the same name, your first instinct might be to assume that he’s miming the whole thing. And perhaps in a few cases he will be. But Egerton did undergo extensive archery training for Robin Hood. And as the video above shows, he actually got pretty darn good.

Using period accurate bows (I imagine modern bows make some of this stuff much easier) Egerton learned to shoot arrows while jumping forwards and backwards. The end of clip even shows him hitting two moving targets in less than one second. His teacher in the video, who is billed as the “world’s fastest archer,” looks pretty impressed that his student pulls it off. (And it does look pretty awesome.)

Here’s the film’s official synopsis:

Robin of Loxley (Taron Egerton) a war-hardened Crusader and his Moorish commander (Jamie Foxx) mount an audacious revolt against the corrupt English crown in a thrilling action-adventure packed with gritty battlefield exploits, mind-blowing fight choreography, and a timeless romance.

I just hope Egerton’s archery skills look legit in the movie and not like digital trickery, since he clearly went to all the trouble to learn this stuff. Robin Hood opens in theaters on November 21.